Tag Archives: childhood

So yesterday, I treated you to a hilarious picture of a unicorn with a unibrow on a unicycle. We all laughed. Remember?

Under the auspices of making sure that posts are being posted properly, but truly as the result of extreme narcissism, I subscribe to my own blog on Feedly. (It’s super satisfying to see the posts pop up in my feed– I get to see them how other people get to see them and I love it!) This morning, my unicorn picture popped up.

O-M-G

Any other Feedly subscribes out there? If so, my sincerest apologies!

Except obviously I’m not that sorry, because if I were, I wouldn’t be posting it here:

Unicorn Porn

Oh dang. That bike seat plus cropping. Well, that’s just unfortunate.

And hilarious to me.

I’ll forgive you if you click unsubscribe now…

(please don’t unsubscribe… please don’t unsubscribe…)

Also yesterday, I want kind of crazy with alliteration. I just love writing that way! And I kept thinking about it all night last night… until the reason I love it so much popped into my head. One word:

Growing up, this was truly my favorite game (and I totally want to play it right now… can we at our next game night, friends? I will buy it and bring it AND bring a bottle of wine so you don’t all hate me!) and we played it all. the. time.

It was a blast. For me, anyway. In large part though, the blast was had because I took advantage of young children. Let me tell you how.

My cousin Spruce and I are relatively close in age (fun fact: Spruce was born on the exact same day– month, day, and year!– as my husband!) and we loved more than anything to gang up on our little sisters. Fortunately for us, our little sisters pretty much worshiped us and were willing to play just about anything even if it meant that they had to be Swahili nerds that got electrocuted by a phone cord, run around as Dr. Pig and Dr. Snort, or get their butts handed to them in a rousing game of Scattergories.

Have you played Scattergories before? The basic premise is that you have to come up with words that start with a given letter and are in a certain category. For example, you roll the letter D, the category is Movies, you could write Die Hard for one point or Dirty Dancing for two. If someone else writes the same thing as you, they cancel each other out and neither of you gets any points. What you couldn’t write would be something like dumb Disney movies. The Disney might get you a point if your companions are feeling generous… the dumb? Not so much… it’s an adjective.

As an evil, conspiratorial child, the trick was knowing what adjectives were, how to use them, and how to lie. Spruce and I went nuts with the alliteration. Letter S, category scary things, our answer: seven slippery snakes slithering slowly (5 points!), but when our poor little sisters wrote down sand storm we’d scream adjective!!!!! and allow them, appearing to be benevolent, a point for the storm. Even though the sand would totally have been a point because it describe a particular type of storm. (For the purpose of distinction scary storm would legitimately not have counted).

We’ve chatted before about how I’m a jerk because I love (oy, my poor, poor little sister! she has put up with so much! and btw, you can click on the hyperlinked “jerk” if you want to see her underwear again… just saying…) and I think this is just another example of that. Because to be honest, there can’t possibly have been any pleasure in beating the pants off our little sister when we’d cheated against them so very, very badly… and yet… I remember these events with great, great joy. Therefore, it must have been the torture and the cheating itself that I loved. In-ter-es-an-te. (Dis-tur-ban-te???)

***All sample categories and answers are purely fictional, made up for the purpose of story telling and to protect the innocent. The letters? Not so much. Like a D needs any protection. Please.

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Being an adult is really interesting because it makes you see your own childhood in a whole different way. It really makes you think.

And when I say you and your, I suppose what I mean is actually me and my… I can’t expect you to feel the same way, after all. (Validate meeeeee….)

Until relatively recently, I’ve had very little occasion to actually interact with little kids. But I’ve had more and more chances lately, especially now that my sister and many of my friends have little ones of their own. (My baby sister has a baby! It’s insane, you guys! Insane!!!)

Being around all these kids, like I said, has been interesting. Especially because I feel like it’s made me a lot less selfish. Because I adore these kids! Adore them!!! All of them!

My friend Aimie (that awesome Aimie I told you about the other day) has two little ones as well and the way her son talks and the way her daughter smiles– it just kills me! Love them!

And of course, I have to mention my sweet little niece– she’s going to be TWO already in a couple of weeks! What?! She’s got this crazy little independent spirit and I just love that baby girl!

And then there’s the little sweetheart who got me a ticket on this thought train at her first birthday party last weekend. Little Lotti (sorry Krystal, names changed to protect the confidentiality of minors) turned one this weekend.

Look at this picture for a moment:

Do you see all those cameras?! Yep, that’s 6 separate camera screens pointed at that sweet little girl all at once… not to mention mine, which took the picture, and the several other people behind and to the side of me. As I scrolled through the pictures after the fact trying to find one without a hundred other cameras in it I thought, wow. Just wow. There are a lot of people who love this little girl.

And then I thought about her future husband, who was sitting on my lap (another baby I just adore!), and I almost got weepy thinking about the two of them walking down the aisle and dang. Just dang.

I have a lot of freakishly distinct memories about my early childhood stored up in my big fat brain, and yet, I can only recall feeling loved from the perspective of a small child… and that just doesn’t do it justice. If I was loved even half as much as these kids are loved by me and all the other adults in their life, then dang. Just dang. That’s a lot of love!

So on Saturday, without a doubt, little Lotti was the most loved little girl in all the world. But I think it’s pretty safe to say that at some point, we all were. That’s pretty nice, right?

"Rachel V. Stankowski considered herself, among other things, a writer. Primarily due to the positive stigmas that accompanied the label, but also because it seemed to excuse some of her more major eccentricities, vanity included."
My brother, also a writer, wrote that about a fictional character. It might have been about me. So I stole it. He's good; maybe I can be too.